London’s Deadly Acid Smog Crisis of 1952

London has always had environmental issues, and with 2017 still in diapers it has already exceeded what the EU considers to be allowable levels of air pollution for an entire year. It must make a Londoner wonder between hacking up a yellowed lung and taking a swill from their pint of Smithwicks if there’s talk in the pubs about whether or not anyone remembers the Great Smog of 1952, and if history (never ashamed to repeat itself) might be itching to unleash another round of pain and suffering on England’s capital city.

Within a few hours of the Great Smog’s arrival, children were being told to stay inside-even if the pigeons did need feeding.

Being the bustling metropolis that it was, there was an ever-present smog drifting above the heads of the city’s approximately 8 million inhabitants, nothing that was considered out of the ordinary for a major urban centre accustomed to pea-soup fog and reliant on the industrial manufacturing that made up nearly 50% of its economy at the time.

On this day, unbeknownst to everyone, things were going to be different. The London fog, usually only a minor annoyance at the worst of times, suddenly developed some teeth.

Fog, smog, and now teeth? How does that all come together? What Londoners-most of whom were burning coal in their home furnaces round the clock because of the cold snap-did not know was that above them a temperature inversion caused by a high pressure system forcing air downwards was underway, causing the air 1000 feet above their Harris tweed walking hat-adorned heads to be warmer than the air at ground level.

Over the span of four days, a 30-mile stretch of unbreathable smog blanketed London from the ground up. The air was turned a putrid yellow and was rank with the stomach-churning odour of rotten eggs, a result of sulphur particles mixing with a smog so dense it almost turned day to night.

Crime rates jumped as thieves took full advantage of the reduced visibility to pick a few extra pockets, rob merchants who chose to close up shop early, and ransack vehicles abandoned on the streets. Air traffic was grounded.

As conditions worsened those that braved a walk through the strange brew (or brisk run in the case of some of the morally-challenged miscreants) would arrive at their destination wheezing, coughing, and covered head-to-toe in a black veil of slimy sediment, as if someone had dumped a bowl of watered-down coal soup over them. It was disgusting. And deadly.

It is said undertakers were having difficulty keeping up with the sudden surge in the demand for coffins, and many a family pet, bird, and wild animal were also killed. The smog was finally blown away from London and out over the North Sea, but not before the damage was done.

While all of this is a bleak black mark on the city’s past, a group of researchers from Texas A&M University have only recently been able to pinpoint exactly what caused this environmental crisis to be such a deadly one.

Back in 1952 the coal being shovelled into furnaces in homes and factories across London released sulphur dioxide. From that, sulphuric acid particles formed. Sulphate was present, thanks to nitrogen dioxide also being on the scene as a result of the chronic coal burning.

All of these compounds then mixed together in the naturally damp and foggy London environment and presto-droplets of sulphuric acid were created and sent hitchhiking across the city where unsuspecting residents breathed them in and they became a lung’s knife-wielding passenger.

Today, London is fighting a battle against nitrogen dioxide, and estimates put the city’s yearly death toll from this ‘invisible pollution’ at 9,000 people. Maybe the next Great Smog might not be as smelly as 1952’s, but the results may be just as deadly.